The Obama administration on Tuesday released previously classified documents showing that National Security Agency employees routinely accessed a phone-records database without legal approval and misled a secret court about their actions.

The documents made public by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper show that NSA workers searched a database that held the phone records of Americans not connected to terror investigations. A judge on the top-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ultimately ordered the NSA to make major changes to the program in 2009.